


Never Thought About Love When I Thought About Home

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Emotional Constipation, M/M, Mild Voyeurism, Parallel Universes, Pining isn't quite the right word but, Pre-Fall of Overwatch, Quiet Resignation perhaps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:17:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21990361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: Jack is in the middle of everything falling apart around him.He doesn't have time to spend in a world where everything is so muchbetter.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 28
Kudos: 93





	Never Thought About Love When I Thought About Home

**Author's Note:**

> *gentle pats for these poor intelligent yet still so dumb men*  
> man canon fuckin sucks when you consider the realities of it, you know?
> 
> title from ["Bloodbuzz Ohio"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xpDCdzl2lc) because I am forever National trash  
> written to the RDR2 soundtrack again, edited to the snores of my family's cat as she keeps me trapped by sleeping on me

“If we just talk to Research and Development -”

“It’s not in the budget.”

“Or Petras, then. If I -”

“It’s not in the goddamn  _ budget, _ Gabriel.” Jack’s hand slams down on his desk, the glass covering the tech underneath creaking worryingly. He inhales carefully, lets his fingers relax and spread. Breaths lengthen and calm as he watches his fingerprints smudge the images under his hands, pictures of burning buildings and rampaging omnics, failure in every pixel.

His failure. 

Gabriel’s, too.

“We don’t have the resources or manpower to go after Talon right now,” Jack says quietly. He looks up for the first time in long minutes, looks Gabriel in the face. He’s staring out the window. It’s the middle of the night, there’s nothing to see - even the stars are drowned out from the light pollution from the city. The flickering screens to their right cast harsh shadows across Gabriel’s face, making his scars seem even deeper, the set of his mouth harsher, the skin under his eyes darker. 

Jack remembers when they were young, when Gabriel’s hair was dark as night and his own as bright as the sun. When everything seemed black and white and the world was full of possibilities. Now it’s all grey and worse than grey, murky smoke that hides the path if the path is there at all.

They used to at least be able to hold on to each other as they stumbled through. Not anymore, though.

“If -” Gabriel starts, then falls silent. Jack can hear the rest of the sentence anyways.  _ If I still had Blackwatch _ , Gabriel’s voice echoes in Jack’s head. _ If Ana wasn’t dead. If I hadn’t sent Jesse to locate the body, and told him to keep going if he didn’t find her. If - if - if - _

“I know,” Jack says, not unkindly. “But this is the way it is. We’re spread too thin as it is. Doomfist is put away -”

“Which is exactly why this is the time to finish taking them out, when their leadership is in shambles!” Gabriel starts gesturing in the air as he continues talking, long fingers dancing as he sketches out plans. Jack’s eyes get stuck on his fingernails, how they’re ragged at the sides like they’ve been splintered against something or bitten down. 

Gabriel would never admit it, but he’s a surprisingly fastidious man - spending far more time on his appearance than anyone would think. Goatees don’t just grow like that, they have to be sculpted. Jack also knows from a few long missions out in the middle of nowhere that Gabriel gets a unibrow without access to tweezers. 

Now the skin under Gabriel’s eyes is bruised, rubbery. There are stray hairs on his cheeks missed by the razor, and Jack knows that there’s a buzzcut under his hat instead of the carefully tousled curls of only a few years back because the less time spent on appearance the more time Gabriel has to try and salvage something, anything.

“Gabriel,” Jack says quietly, and Gabriel’s arms slowly stop and fall to his sides. They look at each other for a long moment, exhausted brown meeting bloodshot blue. 

“Yeah,” he finally says, stepping back and rubbing his forehead under the edge of his hat. “I’ll call Petras about the thing with the guy.”

“Gabriel, I…” Jack stops himself from continuing.

A harsh laugh. “Fuck. He won’t take my calls, will he.” It’s not a question, not really, and Jack doesn’t answer. “So what, I’ll sit around and wait until someone gives me orders like a good little soldier.”

“I could use your help in the lab tomorrow, Winston thinks he worked out a few things with Oxton’s accelerator and wanted to show us.”

Gabriel’s mouth is tight, just a thin straight line perfectly perpendicular with the harsh slope of his nose. He finally gives a single nod and leaves. Jack waits for the door to close before dry washing his hands over his face, like he can scrub the stress away.

If only.

It’s a short walk back to Jack’s quarters, and he thankfully doesn’t see anyone that would ask what he was doing wandering around at one in the morning. It takes two tries before he remembers to remove the glove he’d absently put on during his walk so the pad can scan his hand. It’s that kind of thing that tells Jack he needs more sleep. That and how the AI system sounds almost disappointed in him when he tells it to set an alarm for 0530.

Although it’s a warm summer night, Jack’s rooms feel cold. He used to like having larger rooms, the perks of being a commander. He and Gabriel and Ana could sprawl out, the place filled with laughter and light. Now he doesn’t bother to turn the lights on as he sheds the bits of his uniform that make up his armor, his barrier against the world nowadays. 

Jack climbs naked into a chill bed, curls up on the left hand side and absently stretches an arm out across the sheets. To where someone could be, should be. Won’t be, because Strike Commander Jack Morrison has the world on his shoulders and no time to care about himself, let alone another person. 

He falls asleep with his fingers curled around nothing.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jack is standing tall with his hands at parade rest behind his back, but it’s only habit that’s really keeping him upright. He had troubled dreams, half-remembered images from his past and what he wished could be his present. He’s aware of Winston talking and gesturing on his left, of Gabriel slouching to his right, of Oxton down in the training room below. None of it really penetrates, though.

It’s days like this that Ana’s steady presence being gone is like fingers buried somewhere behind his ribs, pulling steadily, achily. He wonders when it will stop, if it ever will stop.

“So now it’s not just time that we have to worry about, it’s dimensions?” Gabriel’s voice cuts through the fuzz in Jack’s brain.

Winston stammers his way through a variety of syllables before sighing and spreading his massive hands. “Chronal accelerators don’t grow on trees, Commander. We have exactly one, and Doomfist nearly destroyed it. We can stabilize Lena indefinitely here in my lab, but in order for her to go anywhere the original accelerator must be repaired. I did my best, but it’s showing some...irregularities.”

Jack looks down at Oxton, going through some kind of stretching routine that makes his back hurt just to look at it. The contraption on her chest looks relatively the same, although the tranquil blue light occasionally shades over to green before reverting back.

“Define irregularities,” he finds himself saying, as Oxton does a backbend that points the ring of light on her chest right at them up on the balcony. It feels like he has a target focused on him.

“We have years’ worth of reports from Lena of what happens when she becomes unstuck in time. Strange, unpredictable, but following their odd own kind of order. Now it’s - different. She’s not seeing the past or the future, she’s seeing something else. Somewhen else.” 

Jack fixes Winston with a look, and is vaguely discomfited when he seems to wilt beneath Jack’s gaze. “Do you have reports of the most recent problems?”

Winston nods, already backing up. “Let me fetch her interviews,” he says and lumbers back to his laboratory. 

“I wonder if we could do it on purpose. Weaponize it, somehow,” Gabriel says as he grips the railing. “Imagine if we just pointed that thing at people and they just fucking disappeared to some random timeline, where the dinosaurs weren’t killed off or whatever.” There’s a curl to his lip that’s almost cruel, that makes Jack uneasy.

“We can’t -”

“If you say the word ‘budget’ I’m throwing you off the goddamn balcony,” Gabriel interrupts.

Jack rolls his eyes. “I don’t know why you keep thinking this is a personal attack on you. We have. No. Money. Petras is shutting things down bit by bit, it’s all I can do to keep the lights on and food in the canteen and soon enough I’m going to have to go to Winston about manufacturing our own ammunition because we can’t afford it as it is.”

Gabriel turns and rests his elbows on the railing, narrow hips cocked at an angle that Jack ignores like he always does. “Exactly,” he says, cajoling in his tone. “Save money - turn what we already have into weaponry instead of relying on the quartermaster to try and negotiate.”

“I’m not sure why you think this is up for debate,” Jack says, turning to face Gabriel head on. “I know your little group was used to making do, but I’m trying to hold the entire organization together with -”

“Little group?” Gabriel says, eyes flashing in anger.

It devolves into the same old arguments from there, the same ones they’ve had again and again over the past year. Past decades, really. At its core it’s a fundamental difference in training and methodology - Jack is big picture, Gabriel is guerilla warfare. Neither man is wrong, exactly, which means they just retread the same paths over and over until they’re pulled apart or they storm off. 

This time, it’s a nervous voice echoing around the training room that draws their attention. 

“Commanders? Something is - is wrong.” 

Jack and Gabriel look down over the balcony to see Oxton looking nervous and rightfully so - the calm blue light of the accelerator on her chest has turned a worrying red. The red of emergency lights, of fresh blood, of nothing that’s ever good. 

“Get Winston,” Jack snaps over his shoulder without looking away and hears the footsteps of some assistant running towards the lab. “Oxton. Has this ever happened before?”

She shakes her head, eyes so wide the whites can be seen all around. “I can feel it shaking,” she says, and it’s not clear if her voice is trembling from the visibly vibrating machine or nerves. She gives a pained wheeze, and the light fades before brightening worryingly, a beam shooting across the room before it dims down. Jack and Gabriel lean over the railing to see a perfect circle about ten feet tall now missing from the training room wall. There are scientists in lab coats craning their heads to see through the hole from where it went through to the room behind.

“Face the floor!” Gabriel yells out to her as he and Jack sprint down the stairs. Jack is trying to remember what’s underneath this training room, it’s either storage or mechanics and neither is a good option but at least there wouldn’t be people - 

Oxton listens and tries to obey, which is unfortunate because it means the light that pulses out from the accelerator catches Jack and Gabriel when they’re halfway down the stairs. 

Jack hears a buzzing like old fluorescent lights, and his world is turned into a red glow so intense he can practically taste it. He unseeingly reaches out and grabs Gabriel’s arm, and that’s the last thing he can process for a while.

-x-x-x-x-x-

There’s an almighty crash of what sounds like a building coming down all around them, and Jack’s brain automatically shifts into combat mode. Gabriel’s arm is still in his grip, and he tightens it as he realizes that they’re - fuck - they’re  _ falling _ through the air. He flexes his legs just before they hit the ground, but it’s still jarring enough to make him bite his tongue. 

Jack lets go of Gabriel’s arm and they move immediately so they’re back to back. It wouldn’t matter if they were at each others’ throats a minute ago, they’ve always been able to set aside their differences when it mattered. 

Like now. What the hell is happening?

The air is filled with concrete dust, likely from whatever was collapsing around them earlier. Echoes say they’re in an enclosed area, and the light that makes it through feels like familiar artificial LEDs. Better safe than sorry - Jack pulls his sidearm from his thigh holster and the shift of muscles against his back says Gabriel is doing the same.

“You okay?” Jack mutters, immediately coughing and trying to stifle it after.

“Yeah. You?” Gabriel sounds grumpy but all right, so business as usual there. Jack grunts an affirmative in reply.

The dust is slowly settling and Jack squints around. They’re in the training room -

Wait, no. 

They’re in  _ a _ training room, but it’s sure as hell not any of  _ their _ training rooms, definitely not the one they were just in with Oxton. The staircase that they were going down, for instance - there’s no sign of it, just a chunk of stairs and railing and wall that are now surrounding Jack and Gabriel in shattered pieces on the floor. That must have been why they fell, they were still on the stairs before they came - here.

Wherever ‘here’ is.

He knows every inch of his facility, and this room is nowhere in it.

Jack’s brain comes back online and he realizes they’re not alone. There’s a wall at their backs so Gabriel swings around to stand next to him. They move together smoothly though it’s been years since they’ve really fought together - Gabriel crouching low as Jack stays high. He looks around - there’s a bunch of men and women in lab coats looking at them quizzically, an odd mirror of the scientists they’d seen when Oxton went through the wall earlier.

He doesn’t recognize anyone until -

“Ziegler!” 

She startles, pushing unfamiliar glasses higher up on her nose so she can squint across the room at them. “Commander?” she sounds puzzled, tilting her blonde head as she examines them. “What - what are you wearing?”

“Never mind that,” Jack snaps out. “What’s wrong with this room? Where are we?”

Behind Ziegler, Winston lumbers forward slowly. Some strand of tension deep within Jack relaxes a fraction - Winston is familiar, Winston is a constant. If Winston is here, then they can -

“That’s not them.” Winston is looking at them with an expression Jack doesn’t recognize and a tone that’s unfamiliar. He sounds sure of himself, confident in a way he never is outside of when he’s buried in an experiment or talking about his old mentor. The muscles in Jack’s shoulders tighten slowly.

“Commanders Reyes and Morrison are at a meeting in Hyderabad. I’m not sure who  _ they _ are,” Winston says with a gesture of a hand that looks so much larger and more menacing than Jack remembers him ever looking. “But it’s not our commanders.”

“Where’s Oxton?” Gabriel says, and Jack finds himself nodding. “This is because of her. Not her, the - the thing on her chest.”

Winston and Ziegler frown simultaneously, the expressions surprisingly similar despite their vastly different faces. “Her chronometer?” Winston finally says, dubiously.

Jack shakes his head at the unfamiliar word. “No, the chronal accelerator. It was damaged by Doomfist and something went wrong with it.”

The look of cold suspicion is back on the gorilla’s face. “Doomfist hasn’t been an issue in twenty years,” he says evenly. “Try again.”

They’re surrounded by scientists and no one has anything resembling a recognizable weapon in their hands, so Jack takes his left hand off of his gun to rub at his forehead and scrub through his hair. A shower of dust rains down and makes him sneeze, causing Gabriel to snort.

Winston’s golden eyes watch them sharply from behind his small glasses, and he leans down to say something to Ziegler. “You two,” he says to Gabriel and Jack, and they both raise their eyebrows at the tone of voice he takes with them. “You’re staying in here until we figure this out. Backs against that wall.” He indicates an empty corner with a wave of one large hand.

Jack and Gabriel look at each other, an exchanged glance that has a whole conversation in it. They nod simultaneously and move slowly back, neither man putting away his gun nor taking a finger off the trigger. 

Winston turns and says a few words, clearing the room of the scientists that were in it. He speaks into a tablet and as he leaves and shuts the door behind him with a decisive click, the walls begin to shake.

“Headquarters lockdown,” says an unfamiliar AI voice over the speakers. Heavy metal shutters slam down over the windows to the observation room high above them, one after another. 

There’s a moment of silence, before a camera high up in a corner near the ceiling turns and focuses on them with a soft whirring sound.

“That went well,” Gabriel muses as he leans back against the wall.

Jack sighs, shoving his pulse pistol back into its holster. This really wasn’t how he wanted to spend his day.

-x-x-x-x-x-

“- wasn’t Angela’s normal coat,” Gabriel mutters. “The - it’s not the logos, but the design was different.”

Jack nods slowly. They’ve been in here for about an hour and a half, he’s not exactly sure because all the tech in his coat and armor is dead. Apparently it can’t communicate across dimensions and the AI system here must be unfamiliar enough that it can’t connect automatically. They’ve been quietly documenting the changes they’ve seen - even just being in this room they can come up with a hundred off-kilter bits and pieces. 

“Winston,” Jack says quietly, and Gabriel makes a low sound of agreement. He doesn’t really have to say more than that. They’ve both worked with the gorilla for decades, and who they talked to today wasn’t the scientist they knew, not quite. Winston here seemed vastly more sure of himself, more confident. But also - harder. 

Jack wonders if that’s for good or bad. Wonders what made him that way. 

A door on the far side of the room opens silently, and Jack and Gabriel get to their feet, falling automatically into combat positions. Both men straighten up slightly in surprise at who comes in. 

It’s - them. Jack and Gabriel.

Not quite. But close enough.

Their clothes are different, not the armored uniform that Jack wears nor the half-assed Blackwatch gear that Gabriel put together over the years. The other Jack is wearing a uniform-like jacket - still leather, still blue, but it hits at his waist instead of the ankle length duster that Jack has privately thought of as ridiculous more than once over the years. No overdone shoulder armor, no strange and useless straps around the ribs. It’s...functional.

And the other Gabriel? He’s wearing the exact same thing as the other Jack. No Blackwatch black, no stylized skull logos, not even a hat. His hair is longer than regulation length though, unruly dark curls shot through with grey. 

One look at the two of them and it’s clear that they work together as a team. Co-leaders. Not - not whatever the hell Jack and Gabriel are to each other nowadays.

It hurts, in some absent way.

As Jack looks over their doubles, the other Jack does the same. “Huh,” both men say simultaneously, voices sounding as one. Their eyes meet in surprise. Jack’s Gabriel snorts in derision, while the other Gabriel smirks a bit. The more things change the more they stay the same, Jack supposes.

The other Jack clears his throat. When he speaks, his voice is just a bit lighter, smoother than Jack’s own is now. “We were pulled away from a meeting with several heads of state -”

“That no one was unhappy we had to leave,” the other Gabriel mutters, just barely audible. The other Jack rolls his eyes and continues.

“- a meeting that we can’t actually get out of, so let’s try and figure this out before someone drags us into a conference call.”

Jack glances over at Gabriel, gets a look back that says  _ like hell I’m explaining this. _ He restrains himself from rolling his eyes as he turns back to their counterparts. On one hand they should probably be exercising all caution possible. On the other...this is  _ them, _ on some level. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust? “Some time ago, we had a team of agents take down Doomfist…”

-x-x-x-x-x-

“Talon doesn’t exist anymore.” Gabriel’s repeated the same thing three times now, as if saying it over again would have it make more sense. Jack doesn’t blame him, he’s having just as hard of a time processing the information.

Their counterparts’ important meeting was forgotten, as the four men have spent the past several hours hashing through their situation. Winston - their Winston - had seemingly been right when he’d said ‘somewhen else’. Jack and Gabriel didn’t move forwards or backwards like Oxton usually did, they moved sideways. Into another timeline, one with key differences.

Everyone’s childhoods seemed to match up as far as they can tell, their histories up until the Crisis. But here? The Crisis ended. Overwatch ended it. Talon was crushed, Null Sector never developed, there was no Doomfist to damage Oxton’s accelerator because the first Doomfist died before Oxton was born and before he could pass on his title. Before he could be more than a blip in the history records.

Jack wonders what Ogundimu is doing now. Whether he lost his arm at all, whether he was dragged into the criminal underworld. The man is terrifyingly smart - did he end up using his intelligence for good, or did he become a villain in the end after all?

John Francis Morrison lost most of his religion the first time he let a boy wrap arms and lips around him and knew that nothing that felt like that could ever be a sin. The rest drained away with the blood and brain matter the first time he put a hole through a man’s skull and felt satisfaction in a job well done. Even when he believed, Jack never put any faith in predestination, in fate.

Now though, seeing what’s become of the world, what’s become of himself - he doesn’t know anymore.

The conversation moved on while Jack was in his own head, and he belatedly starts paying attention as the other Gabriel links his fingers around a bent knee where he’s perched on a chunk of broken concrete and says, “So what exactly is this - Blackwatch?”

Jack and Gabriel exchange a long, long look, and Jack can feel two sets of curious eyes on them. He can feel the tension in Gabriel, the anger boiling beneath the surface. He wants to touch a comforting hand to his knee like he’s done a thousand times before, but there’s no table to shield them. No way to explain to these familiar strangers the layers to that question, nor how it doesn’t even really matter anymore.

“It would take too long to explain, and it doesn’t matter, in any event,” Gabriel says in a deliberately even voice, echoing Jack’s thoughts. The sound of him swallowing, just barely loud enough for Jack to catch it from a few feet away. “Blackwatch is gone.”

Jack breathes in carefully. They don’t know what it means that Gabriel said that, that for the first time in Jack’s earshot he said that Blackwatch was done. He can’t stop himself from shifting his boot over just a few inches, knocking it against Gabriel’s. The slightest pressure back, a silent acknowledgement.

That’s how they talk, now. Screamed fights and the smallest of physical actions. 

The other Jack’s eyes are on them, and Jack feels like he didn’t miss the movement or the meaning behind it. He stands, says “Give us a minute, please,” and goes over to the far side of the room to talk with the other Gabriel.

“Gabriel -”

“Don’t.” 

Don’t talk about how the other Gabriel has no scars on his face, how his deepest wrinkles are smile lines. Don’t talk about how he moves without the barely visible hitch in his step from where a bomb shattered his right hip a decade back and even SEP couldn’t heal it away completely. Don’t talk about how comfortable he seems in his skin, how he and the other Jack move around each other like two halves of the same, cohesive machine. Don’t talk about how the world they’re in now isn’t falling apart around them like wet paper and it’s only storms as far as they can see.

Don’t talk about how the other Gabriel seems so happy, so content.

So whole.

The other Jack comes back over, leaving Gabriel on the phone with someone. “We need to get you out of the way,” he says bluntly. “It’s not that we’re blaming you - and we do believe you, there was a spike in energy from...honestly I couldn’t tell you but the scientists say that you’re right and it has echoes of the patterns from Lena’s chronal accelerator.” He says the last phrase carefully, like it’s unfamiliar. “In any event, we don’t particularly want people with our faces wandering around and confusing everyone, so we’re going to stash you away tonight and hopefully get this figured out tomorrow.”

Jack sighs as he stands up and Gabriel cracks his neck as he does the same. It’s not the first time he’s spent the night in a jail cell, and for Gabriel it’s probably not even the first time this month. 

“So what, quarantine or just isolation?” Gabriel says tiredly.

The other Jack looks vaguely horrified as the other Gabriel walks up to them. “No…” he says slowly, tucking his phone away. “We have a house, on the edge of town. We have room.”

Jack blinks at him. “You don’t live here?”

The other Gabriel frowns. “God, no. You’d never be able to escape work that way.”

“But in emergencies…” Gabriel says, then trails off. They don’t have the same kind of emergencies here, that’s clear. They’re peacekeepers. Real ones, not what Overwatch tries to be in their own world. 

Tries and fails.

Back on the phone, the other Gabriel says, “Yeah, just bring the car around to entrance 247-B.” He hangs up, looks at the other Jack. “She’ll be there in just a minute.”

The other Jack hits a button on his tablet that unlocks an unobtrusive side door, gestures for Jack and Gabriel to follow the other Gabriel through it. Jack doesn’t know if the facility is still under lockdown - they’re going through narrow, back hallways with no windows and doors that say ‘Maintenance’ and ‘No Entrance’. 

The halls terminate in a larger door with an exit sign. They wait for a minute or two in silence before there’s a knock on the door. The other Gabriel hauls the door open, and Jack can only stare. He makes a soft sound, a broken sound in the back of his throat.

It’s Ana.

Ana in a slightly simpler version of the men’s uniforms, Ana with an unfamiliar blue scarf casually draped over her hair, Ana with a wedding ring still glinting on her left hand. 

Ana, alive.

Jack doesn’t realize he’s not breathing until there’s the warmth of Gabriel’s hand on the back of his neck, fingers pressing in gently. Jack has to turn away before he does something like shoot her, because on top of every other unfairness they get to have Ana too and that’s just one inequality too far. They don’t get to have her as well.

She’s laughing quietly, saying something about how it’s uncanny to the other Jack and Gabriel. Jack tries not to listen, tries to focus on the sound of his breathing and the firm hand still on the back of his neck. 

“I know,” Gabriel says just barely loud enough for Jack to hear, and it’s knowing that Gabriel is likely upset too that brings him back to himself enough to straighten up. The others don’t seem to notice anything has happened as they transfer over keys and chat companionably, but Gabriel’s eyes when Jack meets them are full of pain. Jack gives a slight nod and Gabriel’s hand falls away, though Jack can still feel the warmth for long minutes after.

Jack and Gabriel are hustled into the backseat of a nondescript black SUV before being driven away into the lengthening shadows of a Zurich evening.

-x-x-x-x-x-

It’s a small house, tucked back between the hills of the Swiss countryside. It’s - picturesque, with the edges of a garden that Jack can see around the back and a mailbox that was clearly hand-carved.

There’s something obvious that Jack is missing, that he’s deliberately edging around in his mind because it wouldn’t make sense, it wouldn’t be  _ right - _

“You’re - together,” Gabriel says blankly. He’s staring at a large photo on the wall of younger versions of themselves in suits, arms around each other and glasses of champagne in hand. 

The other Jack pauses, and with his gloves off the steel ring on his left hand is visible. The other Gabriel turns, and the coat he’s slid off reveals his own ring on a chain with his dogtags around his neck. “You’re not?” he says curiously, confusedly.

Jack stares at Gabriel, at the harsh lines of his profile as he keeps looking at the picture on the wall. “You don’t like men,” he says dully. This is a fact that Jack Morrison knows, that Jack Morrison has always known. A fact that has to be true because otherwise - because otherwise -

“You never asked,” Gabriel says, and Jack feels his skin go cold.

The only things he can process right now are the thunder of his own heartbeat in his ears and the echoes of Gabriel’s voice, but Jack still opens his mouth and through numb lips says, “You married Isabelis and you had Kim and -”

“And nothing. It doesn’t matter.” Gabriel turns his face away and walks down the hallway to the kitchen. The other Jack and Gabriel follow after a moment, not quite looking at Jack but he knows where their attention is.

Gabriel had let Jack sob into his shoulder when he broke up with Vincent, had gone to that weird guy over in Recon who brewed moonshine that could get even SEP soldiers fucked up, had let Jack fall asleep on him after slurring out that Gabriel was the only man he trusted now and then held his head over the toilet in the morning. Jack had stood as Gabriel’s best man at his and Isa’s wedding, had made a speech about brotherhood that made Gabriel blink glassy eyes even as it quietly bruised Jack’s heart, had been in the delivery room when Kim was born because Gabriel had no other family left. 

Jack wonders if he was the last to know. If Gabriel had deliberately kept it from him, or just didn’t think it was important enough to tell Jack even though he’d seen the shit Jack was put through as a gay man in the military for decades. He wonders who else knows. Who else - not just knows, but  _ knows _ Gabriel that way. 

Gérard? 

Jesse?

He takes a deep breath and swallows down bile.

Jack keeps his coat on because it’s the only thing holding him together right now, and does what he’s done for twenty years. Compartmentalizes and crushes down, until his face is smooth and his eyes are clear and he’s once again Strike Commander Jack Morrison.

He eats dinner and compliments the pulled pork that the other Gabriel says has been cooking all day. The Gabriel says he got the recipe from his Jack’s mother, but Jack can’t tell if it’s familiar or not, it’s all tasteless stringy meat in his mouth that he mechanically swallows. He makes no attempt to save Gabriel when he’s asked about his ex-wife or daughter, does nothing to help with the awkward silence afterwards. 

Jack helps clean up because that’s what you do when your world falls apart - you wash dishes and ask what they use for tupperware here and try to fit things into the fridge even as you know there’s a system you’re messing up. 

The other Jack and other Gabriel talk quietly for a moment off to the side - and how could Jack not see they interact with the closeness of intimacy and not just work partnership - except it looked completely normal to Jack after all - it’s what he and Gabriel do every day, even now - before the other Gabriel goes off to get clothes for the men out of time to sleep in.

They should fit, after all.

“Gabriel, you’ll be in the spare room,” the other Jack says before looking apologetically at the other version of himself. “You’ll be in Fareeha’s room, sorry.”

“Fareeha has a room here?” Gabriel asks, before Jack can ask the same question.

“Yeah, Ana travels far more than we do so her permanent residence is at headquarters. Fareeha’s here so often we wanted to give her a place, and we thought it’d be homier with us rather than having to deal with all the security and shit there,” the other Gabriel replies.

“Ana... lets her be here,” Gabriel says, and the other Jack gives him a strange look in response.

“Well, she works for us. Not  _ here _ , exactly, she gets seconded to us from Watchpoint: Cascadia. She and Ana bounce back and forth between there and here to spend time with Sam.” 

Fareeha can work for Overwatch here, and presumably it’s something that Ana encouraged. Because they’re safe here, they’re peaceful. 

Jack wonders in despair how they had gone so wrong.

He follows the other Jack to a darkened room that smells of faded sandalwood and rosewater. He looks around - the room of a young woman who doesn’t quite need her childhood things any more but either doesn’t want to let go of them or doesn’t have anywhere else to put them. There are dozens of trophies scattered around, everything from jiu-jitsu to weightlifting. Photos - high school and college graduations and ceremonies and such, Jack and Gabriel showing up in most of them. Eyeliner pencils laying across bullet casings, hair ties twisted around knife handles.

The kind of woman Fareeha could have been, instead of yet another child of divorce who bitterly went into the army as she was denied anything else. 

Jack relates to that.

He puts on the faded Overwatch t-shirt and washed-soft sweatpants - unsurprisingly, they fit perfectly. They should, they’re his after all.

The bed has perfect firmness and the pillows are soft, but Jack tosses and turns. He’s trying to ignore what his brain wants to scream about, and his crowded thoughts make the room feel stuffy.

Getting up after a useless hour, Jack clicks a light on and squints around the room. There are vents near the floor at the head of the bed, closed and no doubt contributing to the stale smell. He pries them open and is rewarded by a soft breeze blowing around his ankles. That’s something, at least.

Jack stares at the ceiling and stares at the back of his eyelids and it takes him a while to realize the soft murmuring he hears isn’t from his thoughts but rather from the vent below him, bringing him noises from the room underneath. He knows that he should get up and close it and deal with the stuffiness, but he’s just so tired.

He’s nearly asleep when he hears his own voice say, “They just look so damn exhausted.”

A noise of agreement, a shuffling of sheets. “All those things they kept stopping themselves from saying where you knew it was just so much worse,” the other Gabriel says quietly in reply. 

Their bed creaks slightly and Jack’s voice when it comes is muffled, like he’s pressing his face into a pillow, or maybe Gabriel’s chest. “Don’t let me get like that,” he says. “Not - sad, like they are.”

Soft rumbles of laughter, and Gabriel’s voice is full of fondness when he says, “Don’t worry, you’ve got me to keep you from being a dumbass. Managed it this far.”

It’s quiet for a bit, just the soft sounds of fabric moving and the bed softly squeaking. Quiet until Jack hears a horribly familiar sound, an intimate sound - it’s quiet until Jack hears himself moan softly into the late night silence. 

“Hush, Jackie, we have guests,” the other Gabriel says, so low the vibrations just barely reach Jack’s ears.

Jack wants, he  _ needs _ to get up and shut the vent and not listen to this, not torture himself with what he’s never been allowed to have but he can’t move. He can’t help but listen to himself make soft, needy noises that are muffled by the sound of wet skin on skin. Can’t help but listen to a laugh startled out of the other Gabriel and wonder what caused it. Can’t help but listen as he finally knows what it sounds like when Gabriel Reyes falls apart, when Gabriel goddamn Reyes groans out an orgasm with the shape of Jack’s name on his lips.

Jack can’t help but listen and hate himself as he hears sleepy, content  _ love yous _ and the sound of breaths lengthening into snores.

He lays there, exhausted and angry, not knowing what to do or what to think. It’s been a long day and a longer year and a longer decade and something deep in Jack Morrison cracks.

Trying not to think about what he’s doing, Jack slides the sheets down slowly, then pushes his borrowed sweatpants down as well. For the first time in months, in longer than he can remember, Jack licks his palm and reaches down to touch himself with intent.

At first it’s mindless, the basic mechanics of skin on skin. Then Jack remembers what he - what the almost-him - sounded like just a bit ago, how much it sounded like he  _ wanted. _

Jack doesn’t remember wanting things, past the abstract. Not for a long time, not since he told himself it would never, could never happen so don’t be that sad stereotyped story of the poor gay boy wanting something he can’t have.

But now he knows what it sounds like when Gabriel - when  _ a _ Gabriel, he has to correct himself, even just in his own head - wants him. Wants Jack.

He lets his mind wander, the way he hasn’t let it in years. Jack thinks about the bulk of Gabriel. The breadth and length of him, what the weight of him would feel like pressing Jack down into the sheets. His Gabriel is harder than the one here, has been tempered and shattered and reforged in the fires of Blackwatch, in the depths of the hell of doing what had to be done when no one else could do it.

His Gabriel would shove those fingers with the splintered nails into his mouth, would press down and pry Jack’s mouth open and trap his tongue. Would whisper nasty, filthy things in Jack’s ear because Gabriel has always liked it when Jack turns red, would say things that would be cruel and true and hurtful even as they would make Jack harder.

Jack slides a hand up and down himself, listens to the slick wet slide of fingers in precome at the head, listens to the crinkle of his fist pressing down coarse hair at the base. He wonders how Gabriel would touch him, wonders who Gabriel has touched. Unwilling images of every agent Blackwatch has ever had bent over and begging flash through his mind, and Jack hates how it doesn’t do anything to make him softer. 

Jack thinks about how there are two Gabriels in this house and comes with teeth sunk into his forearm at the dark, secret thoughts of what he can never have, in this life or any other.

He licks away the trace of blood from his lips and licks his hand clean, and then Jack Morrison turns over and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Breakfast is silent - protein bars and coffee, everyone still half-asleep. Jack uses more sugar in his coffee than his counterpart, and spends a bleary half second wondering if it means anything.

Someone turns on a small screen that broadcasts the news, and Jack ignores it because he’s tired of cataloguing differences and coming up short every time. 

Then he hears Gabriel, hears him make the noise familiar from a dozen bullet holes, a hundred stab wounds, the quiet whine-wheeze of pain he makes when it hurts but he has to keep going. Jack looks at Gabriel’s wide eyes and then looks at the screen. It’s tuned to an American news channel, reporting on a train hijacking gone wrong. An explosion while it was still in a tunnel - criminals and victims all dead. 

Jesse’s face in the mugshot is so hard, no hint of the humor Jack has rarely seen his face without. Jesse and Elizabeth Ashe and the other Deadlock leaders whose names Jack’s lost to years of memories, all gone. He sets aside his feelings and grabs Gabriel’s forearm, rock hard with tension.

“It’s not him.” Jack shakes Gabriel’s arm until he looks at him with a pained, fractured expression. “It’s not him, you know it’s not.”

“It could be,” Gabriel says, voice raw. “He’s gone and I pushed him out -”

“And you trained him so he’s not going to die like that, you know he’s not. He  _ won’t _ ,” Jack says forcefully, staring Gabriel down until he reluctantly nods, slumps back in his seat.

“Who -” the other Jack says blankly. “The gang members? Why do you care -?”

Gabriel stands up so fast his chair nearly falls over, walks quickly out into the back garden. “He was  _ ours, _ ” Jack finds himself snarling, and doesn’t care that he’s probably insulting their hosts. He gets up and goes to the door, watches Gabriel pace around the budding rows of flowers and vegetables until he hears his own voice calling out from behind them, saying they need to go.

Jack and Gabriel are pushed into a corner of a lab, ignored except for when some scientist wants hair samples or blood samples or to measure the width of their noses with calipers. Eventually Winston comes over, trailing the other Jack and Gabriel behind.

“We don’t know how to fix it,” he says bluntly. “It was an issue on your end - Lena Oxton here doesn’t have the problems that yours has, her equipment is completely different. The only thing we can think of is to make sure you’re in the same place at the same time today because the date and time of day appears to be consistent between the dimensions.”

Jack frowns, but Gabriel is nodding. “If the only thing we both know is when it happened, then if our people try anything it’ll be then,” he says. Jack doesn’t know if he’s right, if it’s all pure guesswork, but it’s not like they have any other options.

They’re questioned about how far down the stairs they were when they were brought over, scientists trying to put the chunks they brought with them back together. Eventually they stick Jack and Gabriel up on a cherrypicker, and the waiting begins.

Trapped on a small platform, seated bare inches from each other and ten feet in the air, the tension is palpable. 

“Just fucking say it,” Gabriel finally growls out.

“Say what?” Jack’s too tired for the bullshit. Sometime between the orgasm and waking up in the morning to an unfamiliar alarm, he came to the conclusion that none of it all really mattered, not right now and maybe not when they got back. If they got back.

“Say you’re mad at me. Say all that shit that I know you’ve been building up, the past day or the past decade, I don’t fucking know.”

“Why would I be mad at you.” His voice is flat, incurious. Let Gabriel dig himself as deep as he wants, Jack’s done with it all.

Jack can hear the  _ shush-shush _ sound of Gabriel’s broken nails against his pants, the creaking of his jaw as he clenches his teeth. The soft sound as his lips part and he breathes in to speak -

And then the world disappears in a flash of red light.

-x-x-x-x-x-

It’s pure chaos when they get back, the training room - damaged now even more than when they left - filled with scientists wanting to know what happened. Jack gets them in order as much as he can, but it’s not until Gabriel fires a warning shot into the ceiling that they’re finally able to get everyone to shut up and leave.

Jack orders Winston to get rid of Oxton’s accelerator, fucking sit on her to keep her here as long as that thing won’t do what it did again. Winston nods and stammers his way through an explanation of how they had to keep it to get them back again, but Jack cuts him off with a weary handwave as he trudges out of the room.

He’s stuck in his office for the rest of the day, making apologies to the hundred people he left in the lurch over the past twenty four hours. It’s close to midnight by the time he escapes, able to think of nothing but his own bed and his own goddamn clothing.

When he finally gets his door open, it’s to find a light already on. Gabriel is there, stretched out on his couch. “I thought I deleted your access,” Jack mutters without heat, as he starts the process of stripping his armor off piece by piece.

Gabriel sits up, knuckling sleep out of his eyes. He’s not in his gear, just shapeless pants and a black faded to grey hoodie he’s had for as long as Jack has known him. “You’re mad because I lied,” he says, and apparently they’re going to finish a conversation started fourteen hours and a dimension ago.

Jack pauses just a moment, then continues undoing straps and buckles. “They teach you to do that subtle emotional reading back in special black ops school?” he says mildly.

Gabriel pulls his hat off, scrubs a hand over his hair before sighing and saying, “Fuck off,” in a tone that means  _ I deserved that and will never admit it. _

“What do you want me to say, here?”

“What are you feeling?”

Jack can hear the bitterness in his own laugh, can see Gabriel wince as he turns away to hang his coat on a hook. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

“I’m not going to say I’m sorry,” Gabriel says finally. Jack snorts - like he ever would. The man would break out in hives if he ever truly had to apologize. “It didn’t matter.”

He’s down to his final layer, pulling off his compression shirt and tossing it in the hamper. Jack turns, leans against the counter and stares at Gabriel with his scarred chest bare and his pants hanging low off of too-sharp hipbones. Watches Gabriel watch him, and admits to himself for the first time that he’s seeing heat in the other man’s eyes and it’s not wishful thinking that he needs to crush down yet again.

“You don’t get to do that,” he says quietly. “You don’t get to say that and then sit here and look at me like that.”

Gabriel looks back fearlessly, pointedly lets his eyes slowly drop down and raise back up.

“That’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” Gabriel says, and the humor is gone from his face. “You were with Vincent, then I was with Isa, and then you were married to your job and I could never -”

“Are you seriously saying it was because I worked too much?” Jack’s voice is low and dangerous.

“No, asshole.” Gabriel rubs a hand over his face, fingers tracing his scars in unconscious, practiced motions. “You know why Isa and I broke up.”

There are always things you can’t tell a partner when you’re in the military, but Gabriel, Gabriel couldn’t even tell a civilian what he had for breakfast that morning without violating some agreement or other. Isabelis had finally said that she wasn’t going to raise her child in an empty house full of emptier promises, and Gabriel had let her go because there was nothing else he could do. He’d been shifted into Blackwatch not long after their wedding, and Jack had always wondered if he would have married her at all if he’d been in Blackwatch first.

“It would have been worse with you,” Gabriel continues. “We work together - and against each other, and doing...doing anything would have been a goddamn nightmare on top of it.”

Jack’s silent. He thinks of being able to come to bed and tell someone about his day, truly tell them about it the way he never could with a civilian. Then he thinks of all the operations Gabriel has pulled - all the ones that Jack can’t know about for both of their sakes. All the injuries he’s come back with over the years that Jack doesn’t bother asking after because there’s no way he could get the truth in response. Thinks about what that would do to a relationship when Jack is the one signing the budgets and dealing with the PR fallout.

That’s Gabriel for you. Thinking of the worst case scenario years before anyone else.

“We couldn’t be us, couldn’t do what we do, and also be together,” Gabriel says quietly. “No matter what,” he glances away, because god forbid he show vulnerability even when it’s just them here. “No matter what we might have wanted, I couldn’t go out and do the dirty work and you couldn’t run the show if we - if anything happened.”

“I get that,” Jack says, and Gabriel looks at him in suspicious surprise. “Of course I get that, you idiot. What I’m pissed at is that you,  _ you _ unilaterally decided all of this and let me spend two goddamn decades feeling like a fool.” Jack doesn’t realize exactly why he’s angry until he says it, until he’s spitting each sentence out, the words cracking against the backs of his teeth.

“I had to tell myself over and over for years not to be pathetic, not to moon over something that wasn’t there. But it was there, wasn’t it. You just decided, on your own, that I didn’t deserve it.”

“And have you seen me in any successful relationships lately? Ever? It’s you, Jack. It’s always fucking been you.” Gabriel’s on his feet and they’re glaring at each other from just a few feet away. 

A wave of weariness sweeps over Jack, and he slumps back as he realizes they’re arguing about decades worth of baggage that for practical purposes doesn’t matter, can’t matter. “So what now?” he asks, and watches as the steel in Gabriel’s expression rusts away.

“I don’t know,” is the reply. Gabriel tries to smile and fails. “I mean, I don’t really have a job anymore, not really. So that’s all moot.”

“Gabriel -”

“No, okay? You’ve been trying to get me to say for months that it’s over, so there it is. Blackwatch is fucking gone and I don’t know what to goddamn do now.” There’s something cracked in Gabriel’s voice that Jack doesn’t know what to do with. Gabriel should never look confused, never look helpless; it unravels too many parts of how Jack’s world is put together.

He takes a step forward, then another. Keeps going until his arms slide around Gabriel’s waist and Gabriel rests his head in the crook of Jack’s neck with a sound of what might almost be relief.

“Come to bed,” Jack says quietly. Then a clarification: “Nothing else, just bed. Just sleep.” Jack lets his hands fall away from Gabriel’s sides, and it takes a minute before the other man finally raises his head and steps back. Jack walks into his bedroom, turning out the lights on the way, and doesn’t check behind him to see if Gabriel follows.

He does. 

They shed layers until it’s just skin and underwear beneath Jack’s cool sheets, sheets that warm up with an extra body. Jack spends a minute punching his pillow into position before giving up and resting his head on Gabriel’s broad chest.

He’s close enough to sleep that when he feels dry lips gently press to his forehead, it might as well be a dream.

-x-x-x-x-x-

“Hey, wait,” Jack says the next morning, as they walk past R&D. He pauses, cocking his head before pointing inside the nearest lab. “Isn’t that Oxton’s accelerator?”

It certainly looks like it, although there’s a few extra attachments, including a panel that has some kind of four digit code on it. 

Gabriel sighs as he pulls out his tablet and dials Winston. “I swear to fucking god if they misplaced the thing that can fucking shove people into different dimensions….Winston, hey. You misplaced anything recently? Perhaps something that wrecked my life the other day?”

Jack frowns as he peers closer. The code is changing. No, wait. 

It’s counting down.

“Gabriel…” Jack says carefully, and he can hear Winston’s voice from the tablet yelling at them to get out, to get out right now -

-x-x-x-x-x-

A ripple runs through the building, shaking the walls. The various frames hung on the walls of their shared office rattle, the medals chiming against each other. Gabriel looks around, halfway through pulling on his uniform jacket.

“You feel that?”

Jack’s at his desk, paused with one arm through his matching jacket as he types out an email with his other hand. “Feel what?”

Gabriel looks out the window, but it’s calm. “I don’t know, something like an earthquake. Everything - vibrated for a minute.”

Jack shrugs, finally getting his jacket the rest of the way on. “If it’s something I'm sure we’ll hear about it,” he says as he shoves his wallet in his back pocket and grabs his briefcase. “Come on, if we bail on this meeting again I think Alilovic will make good on her claim to secede.”

Rolling his eyes, Gabriel falls into step next to him. “We could only hope.” A few paces later, as his mind falls back to the events of the past few days: “You think they’re okay?”

Jack shrugs. “They had their issues obviously but...they always seemed to have each others’ backs. Even through this kind of crisis. They survived this long, I’m sure they can handle whatever else is thrown at them.”

Gabriel nods in agreement and tangles his fingers together with Jack’s as they walk.

He’s sure they’ll be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> don't worry I'm mad at me too, yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


End file.
